Easter Weekend Slabs

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend and was able to spend time with their loved ones. I was at Reelfoot with my family (plus one) and we had a blast!

We stayed at Sportsman's Resort South, a place I've inhabited many times before, and where the Chipman's have their camper. Candy and Bill have owned Sportsman's for as long as I've been around there, and with two locations, one at the north end of the lake and the other on the south, they really have everything you need for a comfortable, relaxing Reelfoot Lake vacation. The picturesque location on the south end hosts a private boat ramp for residents and guests of the resort, a fish cleaning station, a cook shack, a screened in porch, and a bait shop with everything you need. It is worth mentioning that the community of full-time residents that park their campers there year-round are a great bunch of folks and a wealth of information for tourists and locals alike. Their spread on the north end of the lake is much bigger and offers individual cabins along with all the amenities mentioned above. They also rent boats and offer fishing packages at both locations. For more information on what's available give them a call at 731-253-6581.

My personal fishing report was not quite as exciting as last weekend, but with my wife, son, and my sister's dog (we're babysitting while she's out of town) in the boat it was definitely an adventure! I was against having to watch the little dog, and believed she would be a nuisance in the boat, but my wife assured me she would take care of her and not to worry. The second I caught our first crappie, Miley (she's an older dog, so we're assuming she was named after nickelodeon Miley and not MTV Miley) came running up to lick and gnaw at the fish's tail, and watched approvingly as I threw the fish in the livewell. The furry little terrier stayed beneath me the rest of the trip, anxiously awaiting the next fish, which she promptly licked and then supervised me as I put the fish in the livewell. We immediately became best of friends, as I told my wife, I've never had anyone that seemed more excited when I caught fish than myself. It is also interesting to note that while she did inspect catfish, bream, goggle-eye, and stripers, she clearly preferred crappie, and who could blame her.

We all caught some fish, and ended up with a decent mess, but the most important thing was spending time together, and I can't wait to do it again!

The fishing trip the weekend before last was one I'll never forget as well, and the video from that trip has gone as close to "viral" as any crappie fishing video ever shot! With 1,600+ views in the last four days, it seems everyone I speak to has seen it, and the World Wide Web is sending it all over the place as we speak. If you haven't seen it, go to my website and click on the "videos" tab, and enjoy!

I've never peddled anything in this article in the 3-4 years that I've been writing it, but that is about to change. I wrote a book during the 2011-12 year of fishing and hunting, and never published it because it was going to cost around $5,000 to do so, but as I have become a bit more computer savvy over the last few years, I have released it as an E-book (you can read it on a Nook, Kindle, iPad, home computer, etc...no physical copy to display on your coffee table, sorry) through Gumroad.com, a site designed for people like me to be able to sell a book without the enormous upfront cost. So if you've derived any pleasure out of this column (a labor of love!) over the past three years, please go to www.joshgowanoutdoors.com and download yourself a copy, I'll spend the $5 on minnows!

Also on my website this week, my dearly missed friend and regular contributor to this column, Chris Stephens, left all of his belongings to his family when he passed, and they are selling his boat. A better catfishing rig will be hard to find, and I'll have pictures and information up there.

Josh M. Gowan

573-579-0212

www.joshgowanoutdoors.com